Without Pants But Wearing a Hat

‘This isn’t how a poor person looks.’

Earlier this year, when I lost a job and was in denial of my new financial situation, still spending $400 every week drinking at the Russian karaoke and buying expensive gifts for Masha, our Italian roommate said, “Serge behaves as if he still has a job. It’s fascinating!”

When my father was twenty-seven, he said to the seven-year-old me, “One day, we will celebrate my birthday by sailing around the world on a yacht.”

I nodded, unsure how to react to such statements except as the absolute, undeniable truth. When you’re a kid, everything your parents say, even if it sounds ludicrous in retrospect, seems like a fact of nature.

“And when you turn eighteen,” he continued, “we’ll buy you a car.”

We were walking by the installation of a Rolls-Royce in Moscow’s Pushkin Square. The year was 2004. The car rotated on a metal cube with a Rolls-Royce logo instead of license plates. I looked at that Rolls-Royce, and I might as well have been looking at a time machine. Driving a car, let alone owning one, seemed an impossible achievement, a part of some other life, which I’d probably get to live no sooner than in a few centuries.

Fifteen years after our walk, I dropped out of university and got a one-way ticket back to Moscow. I didn’t tell my parents.

The flight was on March 8th — International Women’s Day, a big thing in Russia, one of the two gender celebrations of early spring, a day when women receive flowers and quirky GIFs on WhatsApp. I arrived at my mother’s place with…